Plan for ‘Report Cards’ on Schools OKd by State Panel

A model “school accountability report card” that will give parents valuable information about the performance of each of California’s 7,100 public schools was approved Thursday by a key committee of the state Board of Education.

The report card requirement was a little-noticed feature of Proposition 98, the measure approved by voters last November that guarantees 40% of state general fund revenues for public schools and community colleges.

The report would pull together in a single document such information as test scores, dropout rates, class size, expenditures per pupil and the number of teachers at each school who do not hold credentials in the subject they are teaching.

Much of the information has been available in scattered reports in the past, but few parents had the time or knowledge to seek it all out. Now the data would be in a single document that parents and other interested parties can study.

‘Broad Spectrum’

“This provides in a regularized way a report about the broad spectrum of how a school is doing,” state Department of Education consultant Greg Geeting said in an interview. “I like to say it’s the consumerism movement working its way into the public sector.”

State board member Kenneth L. Peters, former superintendent of Beverly Hills schools, said, “We’ve spent 100 years in public education camouflaging important information from the public. It ought to stop.”

The report card was approved by the board’s policy and planning committee, an action that is expected to be endorsed by the full Board of Education today.

Proposition 98 allows each school to develop its own report card, as long as 13 specific areas of assessment are included. However, it is believed that the state board’s model will be widely copied.

Much of Thursday’s discussion centered on a requirement to compare each school’s California Assessment Program (CAP) scores with “comparison groups” throughout the state and with other state and national benchmarks.

Neither teacher organizations nor the Assn. of California School Administrators likes the idea of comparing one school with another.

“These comparisons are usually invalid,” said Barbara West, a second-grade teacher in Walnut Creek and a member of the board of directors of the California Teachers Assn. “You can have a very different kind of class, with very different results, from year to year. If this can happen within the same school, just imagine what differences there are between schools and between districts.”

Board member Marion McDowell, a San Francisco school official, said, “National norms don’t reflect local conditions.”

But Peters said, “We’re compared now with Japan and with Europe and with everybody else,” so he saw no harm in comparing one California school with another.

‘Statewide System’

Geeting said later that without comparisons, “you don’t have a statewide system.”

In the end, the committee retained the requirement to compare one school’s CAP scores with others but said national test comparisons should be made only “where appropriate.”

The state board model would be sent to all California school districts, which would have to adopt either that version or some other for the next school year.